Depressed at apparently being ghosted, Jen opens up…

I enjoyed episode 7. I’d started to think I was going to have to slog my way through the rest of the series without any prospect of joy. Instead, this episode arrives and I found myself laughing and relieved that the lack of plot really didn’t matter.

Why?

Because this episode manages to do something the others failed at – deliver laughs without cruelty or undermining its central premise.

The entire situation is familiar to anyone who’s watched a sitcom – the enforced therapy session. Now, as with all sitcoms and their relationship to therapy, we have a terrible representation of the work, skill and care that real therapy requires, but this is comedyland and, as with a thousand other tropes, we’re in the group therapy session where the hero gets to finally let their feelings out.

Everything and everyone else there serve to facilitate this journey.

The writers feel like they’re on surer ground than they’ve been for the last few episodes – a standalone one set piece where the hero talks to some strangers (aka the audience) and gets to address where she’s at.

We have a great opening montage and then therapy after a relationship goes wrong.

The self-obsessed navel gazing is stopped just before it gets unbearable and from it we get a sense of Jennifer Walters as a human being who’s desperate for connection. It’s poignant, lovely and well written.

We also get a bunch of z-list super heroes who can only exist because they’re, say it quietly lest anyone notices, mutants. After Ms Marvel trailed mutants in the MCU, this series has implied that She-Hulk and Hulk are who they are because they’re mutants. Now we have a group of powered individuals whose powers appear to be the result not of inciting incidents but the way they were born.

Marvel is putting the quiet part right there on screen as if they’ve always been in the MCU. It’s effective world-building and clearly a sign of things to come.

With just two episodes left I’m really not sure what the point of the one-minute blink-and-you’ll-miss-it plot to steal her blood is for. Why not just commit to the sitcom format? As it is, we get another minute of contradictory plot. Last week it was needles, this week that plan appears to have been abandoned; who knows what is going on and who might be behind it and, more importantly, whether anyone cares?

Verdict: This episode worked because we got to see Jen being as close to a real person as we’ve seen – simply living. I don’t really know what the last two episodes have in store. If we can have more of what worked in this one, then great. I suspect we’re going to see ‘plot’ arrive. Who knows whether that will work at this stage in the proceedings.

Rating? 7 buck teeth out of 10.

Stewart Hotston